


beneath the asphodels

by CloudDreamer



Series: Demon Eyes [17]
Category: Dr Carmilla (Musician), The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Bugs & Insects, Buried Alive, Claustrophobia, Dieselpunk, Eating Disorders, Existential Angst, Graphic Description of Corpses, Hallucinations, Immortality, Loss of Control, Parasites, Plague, Suicide Attempt, Trench Warfare, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-16
Updated: 2020-04-16
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:27:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23688421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudDreamer/pseuds/CloudDreamer
Summary: She is an expert in creation and has rebuilt more broken worlds into thriving Edens. She is bathed in blood and torn empires out by their roots, left entire galaxies burning to the ground. Does it average out, in the end?Does it matter, in the end, on this meaningless battlefield?
Series: Demon Eyes [17]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1698556
Comments: 2
Kudos: 18
Collections: Stowaways' Shenanigans





	beneath the asphodels

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by Season 5 of TMA, so there might be some v vague lore stuff and stylistic influence, but I decided to move it from my Mechanized Archives series because I didn't think it really fit.

There is a doctor on the battleground. She is not here to heal the sick. She is not here to soothe the passing of the dying. She is shot by soldiers from both sides, but when she is hit, she reaches inside her flesh, tearing open the skin and exposing bone, and tosses the bullet to the side. Her body knits closed. She digs her teeth into her lips to keep the laugh from escaping, but she trembles a bit anyway. 

Carmilla climbs up and down trenches, ripping through barbed wires as it rips through her. Her clothes are torn to shreds, but the ukulele she wears across her chest is untouched. The bullets ricochet. It needs to be strong for her to wield it, after all. Her boots leave heavy footprints in the mud of no man’s land that washes away with the black rain. The few that live long enough to approach her see her jaguar teeth, too big for her mouth. A mouth that’s covered in crimson. Her forked tongue reaches out and tugs chunks of bone barrow and someone else’s ear back inside. Her nails aren’t long, but they’re sharp and solid.

Her eyes are empty of light, as glassy as a corpse. One of them doesn’t move at all, a scarred mess of tissue she’s long since stopped caring about covering up, but the other isn’t any easier to look into. There is the weight of galaxies in her gaze, galaxies she has explored across every inch and mile. She knows the answers to all the questions you could think to ask, because she has asked them all a thousand times, and she has found the answers. There are no stars over this dreary battlefield. The smoke and the flames steal their light away. 

But if there were, she could tell you a thousand stories about the worlds that lived in their light. She could tell you where the absences are, which ones she watched burn out and which ones she burned herself. This is not the first galaxy she has crossed, not the first one she has memorized, but by the time she’s set out to reach those old galaxies, they will have collapsed. Those stars are living corpses. Their light is slow to cross the distance, and by the time it has reached them, by the time she has reached them, there is nothing left. Nothing but dust and the songs she carries with her. 

She feels the heat of all those dead suns inside her veins, but she is as cold as the corpses she can’t help but feast upon. Beneath the blood, her lips are a pale blue. Her body is not fragile, not any more fragile than the average malnourished teenager on a backwater planet scarred by war, but her hands can tear through steel. There are consequences in the recoil of a weapon that powerful. 

This land is scarred. The trees that once grew not the sky are nothing more than ashen stumps, chunks torn to one side or another by the blast of a mortar. She walks like she belongs here, almost a ghost with the wind in her patchwork cloak and gently vibrant cyan hair but far too real to be a ghost. She is physical in every way, brilliant colors contrasted against the misery of grays and browns of the dead land, and she is beautiful as she feeds. She is a flame, and when she draws near, the soldiers are the moths. They catch her eye and are dazed by the eternity they see in it, the vastness of her reality, and when she pulls herself through the barbed war, not bleeding as it slices her apart, they do not resist her. She can hardly resist herself. There is a thread around her mouth that pulls her here, to these unending fields of anonymity and suffering, and her elation at the fresh taste of meat on her tongue, the warm copper running down her cheek again, is matched by her horror. 

She buries her disgust, buries it beneath the weight of more than trillions of corpses. It is easier not to resist, easier to let the sickening joy rise up in her. She will face her guilt later, when her body does not hunger for more, more, more. It will be satisfied eventually, and it will let her rest. It will let the tears she cannot find the will to acknowledge stream down her face. The bodies crawl over each other, clamoring to be the first inside her, and somewhere inside them, they are screaming. She is screaming too. She watches herself, feeling every wave of euphoria roll across her with sickening intensity, but distant too. There are two of her, the her that is real and the her that she imagines she might be. 

She watches, and she would be powerless to stop herself if she was so inclined to stop. It is a moot point now, because in her bones, she knows this is right. She belongs in dusty trenches, soaked in blood, vomit, and mud. There is nothing beautiful about death, nothing peaceful. Their faces are frozen with a sort of dazed smile. As much as Carmilla would like to imagine the hypnosis dulls the pain and fear, she knows there is nothing merciful about her. 

She has run the tests. Collected the data. She knows with precision, down to the billionth digit, the answer to every question about her that could be answered with numbers, and she has collected the stories of those who’ve lived in times of morbid curiosity. Those tales haunt her every time the weight of her eternal death crushes her.  
But it’s more than that, isn’t it? 

She knows this pain like she knows the back of her hand. For all the good days that have faded with time, all the stories she has lost, the agony of becoming this is as clear as it was then. As she pulls her hand through the chest of a soldier and tears their heart out, right through the ribcage, her ruined eye and the marks on her neck scream with the heat of a star. Sweat rolls down her face, forming a revolting mix with the guts, the blood, the shit, and the rest. She sees her life in blurry grays, sees Loreli in faded outlines, but she sees her death in high resolution.

She tastes rot. There is plague sweeping across this trench, plague she knows she has already caught, and the wounds she reopens with her delicate little fingers, too brittle and breakable for her to go far, they’d say, are rotten. The only thing at home here is infection, rot. Maggots and flies and this butterfly crawl all over, inside and out of bodies that aren’t dead yet but will be soon enough, with where they’ve been cut, shot. There’s not enough room in the medical tent for all of them.

There are pests all over her, she knows, and she lets them come. The scavengers love her. She is their god. She’s infinity to consume. They can eat her up again and again. The dig their holes inside her, make her their home, and they feed. She’ll tear the leeches out one by one, but the only way to escape them after a nightmare like this is to burn. For now, they squirm inside her, multiplying, and she isn’t sure if they’re even real this time. Carmilla watches as she crushes the eyes of someone too young, practically a child. They were shaking, and their forehead was warm. They were crying out for someone who wasn’t there. Someone who would never be there again. Someone they might’ve loved. She knows what it’s like to be haunted. She is haunted now. 

If she were to look, she would see a city in the distance. She would hear a different song, as violent as the gunfire and explosions and her own voice but far older. She might feel a hand slip into hers, the soft reassurance of, “it’ll be okay, Carmilla,” and “as long as we’re together,” and she might forget to force air through her lungs. 

But she doesn’t. She sings, between mouthfuls of flesh, and her song is barely audible. Her hands are around necks, and they are on the strings of her ukulele. She cries out; she is alive. Her song is no less bloodshed, no less warning, but it is hers. It was theirs, when she had a hand to hold, but now that candle is extinguished, and she strides through the dark, alone. She came here with a toy, something not human but not wooden either, and it is gone now. It will return to her side. It always finds its way back to its family. When it is near, Carmilla tricks herself into thinking she is more than the hole inside her chest where love once was. 

But when it is far, her memories remind her of how its movements, how it might smile at her, but it smiles at everyone else. It is a lie, founded on wishful thinking, that she might ever be loved. She is surrounded by the pressure of humanity, of bodies piling on top of her and weighing her down, but she is alone. She is alone, trapped between the sagging ground that refuses to be immutable, and what she has destroyed. The darkness consumes everything here. Carmilla cannot bring herself to rise from the sickening embrace of the dirt. To stand would be to fight further, to consume, and isn’t it better to lie here? Her hunger is satisfied, at last, and the energy that’d propelled her this far, demanded she choke herself with carrion, escapes her. 

Her strings are cut. Those entranced by her light fall still before they scream, a moment of confusion. She knows she has to rise, has to pull herself free, or she will be entombed forever, but the exhaustion clings to her with a quiet fury. She imagines this might be the end for her, that she might close her eyes beneath a collapsed trench and be nothing more than another casualty of some war, in the middle of no where. She imagines it with a fierce intensity as the dirt fills her mouth, crowding her lungs. Her song is muted as the darkness grows thicker. She knows she needs to fight this, but all the energy she couldn’t escape just moments before is gone. There’s no fire. The demon, the hunt, it is gone, and the quiet she longs for when the Sirens grow so loud that she can’t drone them out with her own song has become inescapable. Her open wounds shut with the dirt still inside. She is falling. 

She has been here before. She will be here again. There is no peace for her beneath the earth. There will never be peace for the doctor who cannot escape the battleground. 

When she is exhumed in a hundred years, there will be flowers.

Statement ends.


End file.
